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The FDA is in a very delicate position . On one hand , critics are saying that the FDA is taking too long to release new , potentially life-saving drugs to the public , and critics on the other side are arguing that the FDA is pushing drugs through too quickly , resulting in unnecessary deaths from medications that have yet to be tested properly Even though the FDA says that the amount of drugs being taken off the market has remained steady over the years , a balance between these two positions is almost impossible to obtain and

the FDA will never be able to solve this dilemma . The fact is , this is not a problem they can solve . The health care industry in our country is in shambles and nothing short of a complete overhaul will effect positive change (Meadows

Groups such as The Abigail Alliance are pushing to get new drugs approved much faster with the hopes that these experimental drugs may hold the key to curing many different illnesses . The FDA however , is hesitant to allow such speedy approval . With the recent court case involving patient deaths caused by the drug Vioxx , and the fact that the number of warnings placed on drug labels has increased dramatically over the last couple years , it is easy to see why the FDA would want to slow the approval of the drugs to better test their safety and effectiveness (Leaf

Some individuals , including Don Berry who is the head of biostatistics at M .D . Anderson Cancer Center in Houston , have recommended a new way of analyzing the effectiveness and safety of drugs . The technique , known as Bayesian analysis , allows the testing of drugs to take a more humanistic approach instead of the standard technique of testing , which locks the researchers into the hypothesis made at the beginning of the study , Bayesian analysis allows for flexibility depending on the patients reactions to the drug . According to some , this process of testing the drug , if implemented , would speed up the approval process and disallow many dangerous drugs to ever reach the hands of consumers (Leaf

There are others who feel that we need to understand that some people are going to react negatively to a drug , and when they do , the consequences of taking the drug off the market may be worse than keeping it on one need look no further than the vaccine RotaShield to see how this could be so (Leaf

When children were given RotaShield , they became vaccinated from the rotavirus-a virus that could cause life threatening diarrhea . However once more than a million children had received the vaccine , they noticed some of those children would develop another condition and decided to pull it off the shelf . Eventually other pharmaceutical companies developed a new , safer form of the vaccine . But critics argue , what was the cost of completely pulling RotaShield off the market ? How many more children came down with the rotavirus than needed to (Leaf

According to a Washington Post article , the amount...